Edward MacDowell eBook

To gain a true sense of MacDowell’s place in
American music it is necessary to remember that twenty-five
years ago, when he sent from Germany, as the fruit
of his apprenticeship there, the earliest outgivings
of his talent, our native musical art was still little
more than a pallid reproduction of European models.
MacDowell did not at that time, of course, give positive
evidence of the vitality and the rarity of his gifts;
yet there was, even in his early music,—­undeniably
immature though it was, and modelled after easily
recognised Teutonic masters,—­a fresh and
untrammelled impulse. A new note vibrated through
it, a new and buoyant personality suffused it.
Thenceforth music in America possessed an artistic
figure of constantly increasing stature. MacDowell
commanded, from the start, an original idiom, a manner
of speech which has been recognised even by his detractors
as entirely his own.

His style is as pungent and unmistakable as Grieg’s,
and far less limited in its variety. Hearing
certain melodic turns, certain harmonic formations,
you recognise them at once as belonging to MacDowell,
and to none other. This marked individuality of
speech, apparent from the first, became constantly
more salient and more vivid, and in the music which
he gave forth at the height of his creative activity,—­in,
say, the “Sea Pieces” and the last two
sonatas,—­it is unmistakable and beyond dispute.
This emphatically personal accent it was which, a
score of years ago, set MacDowell in a place apart
among native American music-makers. No one else
was saying such charming and memorable things in so
fresh and individual a way. We had then, as we
have had since, composers who were entitled to respect
by virtue of their expert and effective mastery of
a familiar order of musical expression,—­who
spoke correctly a language acquired in the schools
of Munich, Leipzig, and Berlin. But they had nothing
to say that was both important and new. They
had grace, they had dexterity, they had, in a measure,
scholarship; but their art was obviously derivative,
without originality of substance or a telling quality
of style. It is not a needlessly harsh asseveration
to say that, until MacDowell began to put forth his
more individual works, our music had been palpably,
almost frankly, dependent: an undisguised and
naive transplantation, made rather feeble and anaemic
in the process, of European growths. The result
was admirable, in its way, praiseworthy, in its way—­and
wholly negligible.

The music of MacDowell was, almost from the first,
in a wholly different case. In its early phases
it, too, was imitative, reflective. MacDowell
returned to America, after a twelve years’ apprenticeship
to European influences, in 1888, bringing with him
his symphonic poems, “Hamlet and Ophelia”
and “Lancelot and Elaine,” his unfinished
“Lamia,” his two orchestral paraphrases
of scenes from the Song of Roland, two concertos,
and numerous songs and piano pieces. Not greatly